What I Read This Week: April 19, 2013
What a stressful, paranoid, and unbridled week—in a terrible, awful, no good, very bad way. I like to think I’m still too stunned, but part of me doesn’t want to acknowledge my ability to feel incredible amounts of anger, fear, resentment, and fury towards what happened.
The first thing this made me think about the Unibomber, which felt so long ago. Remember the wait? The extended periods of unsurety? It took months, months.
This is so much faster, more brutal. We barely have time to process one horrifying event before the next begins. These are friends, parents, children, humans who have to deal with other people’s desperation and incomprehensible desires. I hurt for humanity. I ache for the future, and I lament this week’s cruelty for the people who found themselves directly in harm’s way. I could be that person, so could you. It is only by sheer improbability and luck that we follow along instead of finding ourselves so impacted that we cannot see beyond our immediate misfortune.
I didn’t mean to go on about Boston, but here we are. It was a weird week not just for life but also for reading. We’re all over the map, and hey, there’s nothing that I’m exceedingly ashamed of reading. smh
- Watched: Marfa, Texas: The capital of quirkiness
- If this True Blood rumor is true, we may have to burn down HBO on io9
- All great managers are alike by Tom Tunguz, “Work in every role within your team. … Be aggressive. Try new things. Allen is the most prolific filmmaker in history setting a pace of 1 movie per year for 40 years. Many of those films have been flops or failures. But he has a litany of awards including 4 Oscars. In his own words, he says he is unafraid to fail. … Build it because you love it. Despite his fame, Allen has never made movies that were certain to be commercially viable. Instead, he worked on projects that excited him.”
- Photos From the Manhunt in Boston
- A pair of 2011 blog comments by “Dzhokhar Tsarnaev”
- What We Know About Boston Marathon Bomb Suspects Dzhokhar And Tamerlan Tsarnaev
- Bombing Suspect After Killing First In Early Morning Shootout
- Boston Bomb Victim in Photo Helped Identify Suspects
- How Much Can You Receive? by Michele Lisenbury Christensen, “I jest, but really: experiment with catching your longings jumping into your pocket, and you, too, may notice your reluctance to receive them.”
- Parkinson’s law of triviality on Wikipedia
- 5 Hard Questions to Ask Yourself During a Conflict by Julie Zhuo, “Every conflict is, as they say, a two-way street. It can’t possibly always be the other person’s fault. And even if it is, or you aren’t sure if it is, why sit around waiting for things to get better? … This is the most important lesson I have learned about conflict: Separate the point from the person. Take the former as empirical, and respond first and foremost to that. … Would I be comfortable saying what I’m saying to the other person in front of a group? If the answer is “no,” I need to stop talking. Now. Immediately. … You can only influence the things you do and say, but that’s a whole lot of power.”
- Untitled Essay by Julien Smith, “An important part of discovering / creating your own future is to find out, or plan, who you are going to become. This sounds kind of obvious– doesn’t everyone think about this?– but in reality, it isn’t often done.”
- 100 questions to inspire rapid self-discovery by Alexandra Franzen, “What do you value most: free time, recognition, or money? … Where + when do you get your BEST IDEAS? … Do you have any habits or quirks you wish you could ERASE?”
- You are not confused. by Alexandra Franzen
- My (new) favorite question of all time by Alexandra Franzen, “What’s the EASIEST thing you could do, right now, that would have the BIGGEST positive impact on your life & others?”
- The Current State of Student Loans by Kristen Hawley
- Accused Nob Hill Murderer Is Psychic Craps Player on SFist
- Boston bomb suspect spotted on video, no arrest made
- Watched: The Needle Drop – Thee Oh Sees review
- Never-before-seen photos from 100 years ago tell vivid story of gritty New York City, “Over 800,000 color photographs were taken with 35-mm cameras for tax purposes. Every New York City building in the mid-1980s can be viewed in this collection.”
- Watched: Narduwar vs. Alt-J
- Coffee & Empathy: Why data without a soul is meaningless by Om Malik, “What will it take to build emotive-and-empathic data experiences? Less data science and more data art — which, in other words, means that data wranglers have to develop correlations between data much like the human brain finds context. It is actually not about building the fanciest machine, but instead about the ability to ask the human questions. It is not about just being data informed, but being data aware and data intelligent.”
- Watched: 2 People Described The Same Person To A Forensic Artist And This Is What Happened
- Watched: Video Demonstrates the Bizarre Visual Effect on a Woman’s Face From a Rotating Light Source
- Talking with Steve Egger on True Crime Diary
- Tavi Gevinson: ‘I Think Fashion And Feminism Can Be Friends’ “I even think that fashion can be a tool of feminism and of self-expression and individuality and empowerment. But clearly there are flaws with the industry that still really grind my gears.”
- This Is Bonkers: Video Proof Of R. Kelly’s Coachella Appearance
- Books About Color Every Designer (and Color Fan) Should Own
- False Things You Heard About the Boston Bombing on Mother Jones, “That’s inevitable during a breaking news event—and in this case, even some law enforcement officials did more to confuse than to clarify. But one day later, here’s a look at some early storylines that have fizzled upon further scrutiny”
- The 50 Best Things We Saw at Coachella on Spin.com
- At Home in the Modern World: Modern Design & Architecture
- Using Social Media to Build High Quality Relationships and Increase Sales, “Engage – create conversations with your target audience, offer value – aka Answer Questions that people are asking or Introduce people in your network that can help each other, sharing is caring – it’s easy to support related interests, brands etc. “Social Media is not difficult; it’s about building rapport and connection with your desired audience.” (Source: Meighan O’Toole)
- On Getting (and Using) Another Chance by Lisa Congdon, “There was a time when I asked the universe for “a lot of work.” I thought that’s what I wanted. When you are starting out as a freelancer and you have very little work and struggle to pay the bills, often times “a lot of work” is the goal. And, on top of that, you want great jobs and clients. Over time, I got all of that: a lot of work and amazing clients.”
- If you don’t A-S-K, you won’t G-E-T. by Wilson Miner, “One piece of advice I’ve given designers starting out is don’t put work in your portfolio that you don’t want to do again. It’s easy to feel pressure to “round out” your book, and make your skills look as broad as possible. But it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy — the work you show is the kind of work people will ask you for. Typecasting is just human nature.”
- Featured Designing Mom: CleoMade, “The studio is my clean peaceful sanctuary; it is finally nearing completion after 15 years of DIY construction projects. Almost daily I fend off someone’s advise that it would be good for me to put their old couch in my studio. I try to keep up the impression that it is a special treat for the boys to work in the studio. It makes rainy days more exciting, and they have to be respectful of my “work” supplies. I do a lot of my computer work in the house though.”
- Do No Harm by Anil Ananthaswamy, “As it turns out, the brain maps far more than just the body’s outer surface. According to neuroscientists, the brain creates maps for everything we perceive, from our bodies (both the external surface and the interior tissues) to attributes of the external world. These maps compose the objects of consciousness.”
Real, actual books:
